Not ready for prime time!

[Techie-Jack]

Recently we purchased a new 43" Samsung TUV7000 TV to replace our old (15 Years?) Samsung 40+" TV.  I was shocked at the terrible experience when we unboxed it and set it up! Does nobody at Samsung ever test these things? I'm guessing they focus on the US market and have only lip service for Canada and other markets?

Here is a list of all the **bleep** I had to endure:

1. It suggested I used the Smart Things app on my iPhone as the "quickest and easiest" way to set it up. When I downloaded and ran the app I got into a wonderful loop where it asked me to first identify the TV. I'd select it and then the app would say that I needed to give it access to my network settings and took me right to the section of the settings where it showed the network settings and permissions it wanted. However there were NO means of progressing pass this point. I have the latest iOS (15.1) on the phone and yet it would not present a "Next" "Done" "Continue" "Save" etc. therefore any means I had left to get out of this screen took me right back to the Network settings screen again on my phone. It was totally frustrating!!

2. I put in the wireless settings manually using my remote but the Smart Things app would not let me progress without giving the okay to the app in the network settings.

3. After giving up on the Smart Things app as clearly it hadn't been tested and had no settings for tech savvy users to bypass their hand holding quick setup **bleep** I tried to set the TV up using the remote. I was able to put the wireless information in as I mentioned but when it came to detecting what was connected to the HDMI connections another issue arose. (I was shocked that there were still only 2 HDMI connectors after 15 years! I guess they want to sell you a digital amplifier to augment the number of HDMI sources you can have and circumvent the shortcomings of the TV design?) It correctly identified the Samgsung Blu-Ray player right away. Also our Samsung sound bar worked connected via the optical connector just fine. (Had to change the TV audio settings to use it obviously.) For the main source it asked us to identify our TV provider listing many of the big ones from the US and the few that we have here in Canada.  However Cogeco has traditional cable, TiVO and now Epico as the services they provide.  TiVO is actually available from other providers as well.  However selecting Cogeco when you have TiVO does not work. It still lists the service connected to the HDMI as unknown. What's more it also wants to configure your remote whenever you use it!  Luckily our Cogeco remote is still recognized by our new TV so we never use the remote that came with the TV. Whats more because the connection is unknown it always brings up Smart Things for about 30 seconds until it disappears allowing you to view the TV normally.

4. When you pause and resume playback of TV there is about a 3 second audio delay so the video continues silently until it kicks in.  Often this means you have to back up to a spot earlier than when you want to play so you get the audio as well when it gets to the point where you want to return to. (Therefore you cannot just pause and resume at will.)

5. I tried setting up two factor authentication just to see if doing so would allow me to complete the App setup on my phone and it did not.  It makes me wonder who on earth would want to use two factor authentication on an account to manage your television?  I'm guessing they use the same interface for people who own Samsung phones but otherwise I don't see my TV/Blu-Ray player as being on par with my bank account in terms of security requirements!

6. The Samsung support website.  All aspects of this are beyond horrible! I don't know if anyone at Samsung has put any time or money into this thing for a very long time!!  I almost don't know where to start but I will give you a list of the things I discovered:

- I went to the support chat facility via my phone and typed a very long message with regards to the problems I was having. You can imagine my joy when there was no way to actually transmit it against the case number I'd been assigned!! It did however present me with literally hundreds of links to support and community references to every single word contained in my chat. I dutifully scrolled (and scrolled and scrolled and scrolled and scrolled!) down to the bottom of all these useless offerings only to find there was no submit, done, send or whatever. What a colossal waste of time!!

- Then I decided to email Samsung what I'd typed and not only had I lost everything I'd typed for my chat (so I couldn't copy/paste) but they don't have a mobile version of the web page (or their server isn't detecting I'm on a phone I suppose) and presented me with a totally unusable page for doing my email submission form.  Yes I know I could blow it up but trust me even then it was totally unusable!

- I resigned myself that I'd have to lodge my questions via my laptop so I went to Samsung support section of the website and logged in.  Before it allowed me to continue it asked me what Samsung device I had. This was a bit strange as the TV was registered under my account and so it wasn't presented as a suggestion. To put in the device it wanted me to search for it. Much to my surprise everything I typed in gave no results found. So then I went back to select it using the website GUI. They had almost no current models of Samsung TV's in there!  The only ultra high def 43" TV they had was the UHD6900 which meant if I'd wanted to use their support email submission I'd have to artificially put in the wrong model of TV just to get to the next page and be able to type my message! I checked the sales portion of the website and while they show larger sizes of the TUV7000 they don't show mine making it painfully obvious they really don't want to sell or support it if they don't have to as they could allocate web space to larger and more profitable sets.

- The community forum does not make it clear as to why you have to setup a separate login from your Samsung account.  Having a nickname or chat handle created when you make your Samsung account would have removed the need for this and also save confusion for clients.

So all of the above is why I'm now relegated to putting my support questions in a community post as there is no other actual way to get a message to Samsung.  It is clear to me that the Samsung website, the Smart Things application and likely the whole support department are outsource to some corporate entity with better sales people than technical expertise or otherwise they'd fix all of this **bleep**!!  I cannot tell you how disappointed I am that we were loyal to Samsung.  I may take everything back still although that too is not without its grief.  I will await to see if Samsung reads this and / or responds.

P.S. This just gets better and better... when trying to submit this I had a sub category of "Terrible Out of Box Experience!" and the support forum states that I have to choose from "One of the support categories below". You guessed it... there's NO support categories showing!!  I've tried typing "TV" so let's see if that flies... - Techie-Jack (Original - No. "TV" - No. we'll see if I find something that actually works!!

[Reynaud]

Hi Techie-Jack, We suggest you to check with smartthings support as we have a dedicated team who can guide you and help you to fix any smartthings inquiries.
They have chat and Email support.
https://www.samsung.com/ca/support/contact/#onlinesupport